Mother Facing Prison for Caring for Sick Son

This story about a mother facing prison shows that state law enforcement officials are torturers.

Minnesota has voted to legalize medical marijuana. The law will probably be abused by some who really just want to get high. It will probably open up new avenues for getting the drug for recreational purposes.

But the evidence seems overwhelming that, for some, marijuana is the perfect medicine. This shouldn’t surprise us. Most dangerous drugs have or had medicinal uses. Some are obviously helpful to people wanting relief in the midst of sickness or injury.

Which brings me to this story about a Minnesota mother who is being charged with “child endangerment.”

Thanks go to the Free Thought Project for bringing this story to my attention. This mother is facing two years in prison because, following her Minnesota doctor’s recommendations, she took her son to Colorado to try cannabis oil. Immediately he ceased to have the paralyzing painful seizures that had tormented him since a baseball accident.

I assumed, when I first heard about what was happening that the mother would be charged with a controlled substance violation. But the report above says “child endangerment.”

Yet nothing indicates that the authorities dispute the claim that the child was substantially healed by the use of the cannabis oil. No one claims this is all a big ruse so that the mother can get her son high. How can she be prosecuted for child endangerment for steps that she took which removed her son from danger?

It seems that, when a substance is banned, facts don’t matter. Cannabis oil always counts as a harmful substance no matter what it actually does to the health and the well-being of the person.

Let’s be clear that this is illegal. Parents are supposed to care for their children. The governments of many states have unjustly taken children from their parents for the mere suspicion that they are not making proper medical decisions. Here the government is saying that their legislative statute trumps the fundamental law of God that parents should care for and protect their children.

[Notice, by the way, that my argument here does not demand any position on marijuana or controlled-substance laws. One can agree with such laws and yet still find it evil and disgusting that prosecutors would apply them to this specific case.]

The traditional way the real law (that parents should care for their children) can be upheld over the statute which, in this case, is clearly wrong, would be a jury trial with a properly-educated jury that knows that the jurors are trying not only the accused on the facts of the case but also the law itself. Juries are supposed to be able to declare a person not guilty if they decide the statute itself is unjust.

Sadly, judges and many others have worked to marginalize and deny the power of the jury to safeguard liberty against legislators and prosecutors. Typically, arguments are not even permitted to be made against the law.

But the authority of the jury is final within its sphere. An educated and principled jury would tell the prosecutor to go jump in the lake.

One other point: notice that the family got in trouble because they used public school. The teachers and administrators saw the boys grades improve and began to get curious. Then they turned the mother into the police for the crime of making a pain-paralyzed young man into a better student.